Page 8 of Brutal Bratva’s Owned Hostage

That look cut deeper than it should have.

“Val.” I kept my voice low, the way I had in the poker lounge hours earlier, though I doubted it would land any better this time. “Look at me. It’s done. You’re safe.”

She didn’t answer. Her mouth opened, and nothing came out. Her legs looked close to giving out completely.

Just then, Roman and two more of my men arrived, moving with the speed and efficiency of people who’d cleaned up worse messes than this one. Roman started in on questions the second he cleared the stairwell—who were they, did I know who’d sent them, what was I planning to tell the other residents about the two dead men in the hallway—and I ignored every word. None of it mattered more than getting Val out of the hallway with blood on the carpet before whatever was holding her together finally broke.

“Handle it,” I told him, already moving Val toward the stairs with a hand at the small of her back. “I’ll deal with the rest later.”

“Dmitri, we need—”

“Later, Roman.”

He knew better than to argue further.

I got her down to the car before her knees gave out, catching her against my side. Seeing her this way again, shaking and silent, settled a kind of quiet fury in me that had nothing to do with the dead men and everything to do with the ones who’d sent them.

I didn’t take her back to the penthouse.

As I watched her stare out the window without seeing any of it, I decided the last place she needed to be right now was another version of the room she’d woken up in that morning, however comfortable it was.

So I took her to a small restaurant tucked into the ground floor of one of our properties.

The place was nearly empty, featuring warm light and low music, with the smell of garlic and bread already emanating from the kitchen as they prepped for the day. I steered her toward a booth in the back corner, away from the windows, and she sat down like her body had simply run out of ideas about what else to do.

She didn’t speak for a long time. I watched her hands, wrapped around a glass of water one of the staff had set down without being asked, tremble so much that water sloshed dangerously close to the rim every time she tried to lift it.

A woman from the kitchen brought food without either of us ordering anything.

“Eat something,” I urged when she simply stared at the food for over a minute.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You will be, once your body remembers it’s still alive. Eat anyway.”

She looked at the plate again, like it belonged to someone else. I reached across and slid it another inch closer to her, close enough that avoiding it would have taken more effort than picking up a fork.

“Dmitri.”

“Eat first. Talk after.”

She didn’t argue, which told me more about the state she was in than anything she could have said. She picked at the food at first, clearly not tasting any of it, and then as the minutes passed, color began creeping back into her face. I watched it happen, some of the tightness behind my own ribs easing with every bite she actually finished.

I wondered why her getting some color back in her face mattered to me the way it did. There was no answer I could come up with.

“Who were they?” she asked finally, once the plate was half empty.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You don’t… know?”

“Not yet.” I turned my glass slowly on the table, watching the condensation ring it left behind rather than her face. “The raid on the lounge was coordinated well enough that whoever planned it had real information about our operation. Men showing up at your apartment less than twelve hours later means they either already knew who you were before last night, or they found out fast enough to act on it immediately. Neither one is good.”

“So this isn’t over.”

“No.”

She absorbed that quietly, staring down at what was left of her food, and I saw something in her expression finally give way. She’d spent hours insisting she wasn’t part of my world, that danger didn’t have any real claim on her simply because she’d witnessed one bad night. Two dead men in her hallway had made that argument considerably harder to believe.